![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/01\/mak-ying-tung.jpg\")
Image: Portrait of Mak Ying Tung.<\/p>\n Image: Portrait of Mak Ying Tung.<\/p>\n
Mak Ying Tung is a multidisciplinary artist with a wry sense of humour. Born in Hong Kong in 1989, she organised her first exhibition in 2012 at the School of Creative Media in her hometown. Featuring a range of installations involving stationery, highlights included \u201cEveryone Makes Mistakes\u201d, a compass that traced a square, and \u201cI can\u2019t live without you\u201d, a calculator missing its equals button.
\nFollowing this, Mak developed her witty aesthetic further. In 2014 she got her first white cube solo show, \u201cAlmost Empty\u201d, at Hong Kong\u2019s Gallery Exit. Filled with party balloons, it was at once comic and emblematic of the frailty of human struggles. Exemplifying this was \u201cNo One Wins\u201d, an office chair with a leg balanced on one of these rubber inflatables made of resin. Cheeky here, Mak underlined the instability our mortal existence \u2013 a theme that is personal to the artist. \u201cFor ten years, I used to be a very hardcore Christian,\u201d she says. \u201cI always felt that there was a part of me that couldn\u2019t be fulfilled. When I stopped believing in Jesus, I got depression, a crisis of belief.\u201d Juggling the competitiveness of Hong Kong\u2019s highly commercial art market alongside the city\u2019s steep cost of living, Mak copes by making absurd yet pointed artistic gestures.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/01\/Sund-of-Music_MV-1.png\")
Image: Mak Ying Tung. Film still, “Sound of music”, 2017.<\/p>\n
In 2016, she formed the art collective Come Inside with Wong Ka Ying. Named after a statistic suggesting only 30 percent of women climax vaginally (\u201cI am one of them!\u201d she says), the collaboration acts as a vehicle for skewering stereotypes of Asian women. For instance, this October at Dallas\u2019s Crow Collection, they staged an exaggeratedly slow game of tennis (the ball was attached to each racket by a cord) while dressed in pink tops and white school skirts. Exposing the fetishisation of adolescent Asian female bodies, it confronted the audience with pop culture\u2019s inherent prejudices.
\nMore of her rebellious spirit can be found in \u201cWe Are All Equal\u201d (2015), a seven metre long shelf holding a neat row of various supermarket products. Contrary to the profit- boosting logic of consumerism, the selection of these items, and therefore their significance and value, was arbitrary but for the boxes\u2019 sizes. \u201cThose are probably standard,\u201d Mak admits, when explaining she was trying to break free from supermarket buying algorithms. Nevertheless, the result of this arrangement speaks of the way in which consumption orders society \u2013 as well as the nearly-insignificant transformative potential of small acts of resistance.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/01\/Sound-of-Music.jpg\")
Image: Mak Ying Tung, Installation View, “Sound of music”, 2017.<\/p>\n
For Art Basel Hong Kong 2016, Mak was invited to show at Videotage, the city\u2019s new media art institution. \u201cThey said they\u2019ll provide a screen and a microphone, and I thought that\u2019s perfect for a karaoke,\u201d she recalls. Those were also the words that prefaced her karaoke performance during the fair, which was a year later transformed into \u201cSound of Music\u201d, shown at Hong Kong\u2019s De Sarthe gallery. Accompanying it was \u201cYou Better Watch Out\u201d, an installation in which the artist filled a human-sized transparent sphere with small colourful balls and a mysterious QR code. When the audience scanned it with their phones, they were presented with live CCTV footage of themselves. \u201cI wanted the work to be subversive and participatory\u201d, she says. Hopefully Mak\u2019s droll art will continue in the same vein.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/01\/Installation-View-1.jpeg\")
Image: Mak Ying Tung, Installation View, “Sound of music”, 2017.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Mak Ying Tung makes participatory media art that subverts systems of power and oppression. Her double-edged multidisciplinary installations show both wit and gravity.<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":60978,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[11856,139],"tags":[4734,38,4247,39,10042,10043,10044],"class_list":["post-60969","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sleek-art","category-art","tag-4734","tag-art","tag-art-basel-hong-kong","tag-artist","tag-mak-ying-tung","tag-school-of-creative-media","tag-wong-ka-ying"],"acf":{"main_category":null,"legacy":"1","exclude_from_ads":null,"hero_title":null,"subtitle":null,"hero":null,"teasers":null,"facebook_image":null,"related_articles":null,"next_article":null,"sleek_card_focus":null,"content":null},"yoast_head":"\n